Dialectical Notes

Capitalization: The first yo in an Ebonics sentence is of course capitalized, because it is the first word. The last yo in any Ebonics sentence is also capitalized because it is being used as a proper noun; for in the Ebonics world inhabited by the Yos of Venus, everybody has the same name, and that name is Yo. Karl Marx would have heartily approved of this social leveling mechanism.

Primary Words: Ebonics is dominated by five primary words, all of which alternately serve as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns and even as punctuation! These five words generally constitute, when optimally utilized by a fluent Ebonicist, 60% to 70% of the vocabulary. They are, from most to least frequent:

1. Yo
2. F***
3. S***
4. B****
5. M*****f*****

As any astute linguist will note this permits people to communicate Ebonically with only five words, which is far more convenient than the 10,000 to 25,000 words commonly employed by English-speakers, with the result that fluency may be obtained within one hour of cultural immersion! Any other language, imperialistic or oppressed, can be harvested for lone words by the Ebonicist. Also, Ebonics is even more nuanced than Latin. For this reason, with the death of Latin as a functional academic lingua franca, and the distasteful prospect of using English—the language of monopolistic capitalist oppression—as the means of international communication on Lunar and other Solar colonies, I humbly recommend that the International Space Agency adopt Ebonics as its operational language.

Since Ebonics is an umbrella language utilizing loan words, I will go even further with my proposal. Once interstellar generation ships have been deployed the use of Ebonics among the colonists should permit them to communicate with any alien species which utilizes audio communication. This could be Ebonics greatest contribution to humanity, permitting Terrestrials to dominate the Galaxy as the agents of an umbrella language.

Caution: the absence of hands or approximate forelimbs with three or more digits among any aliens encountered could result in their lack of aptitude in expressing the full breathtaking range of Ebonics. In such a case let us not permit digitally challenged beings to become oppressed second class members of the Galactic Village.

I do most sincerely appreciate the laudatory applause that the reader no doubt believes is going unappreciated as he heralds this proposal from the privacy of his/her/its computer console. And, furthermore, I would like to grant full permission to any and all individuals and institutions to reprint, disseminate, and otherwise utilize the complete Ebonics Dictionary with footnotes, provided above in unabridged form.

James LaFond, 3/16/12

Foreword

I conceived of this article based on three February and March 2012 experiences with a set of suburban youths attempting to terrorize the riders and drivers of the #55 bus to Fox Ridge between 9:45 and 10:00 PM. I was stricken by the fact, that even as these man-children were projecting themselves as lethal terrors of the most masculine sort, that the planet Venus was shinning more brightly in the night sky than her celestial brother Mars.

After looking back upon my notes, I do not consider these youths to be enough of a threat to write about in Harm City. However, I have retained the forward portion of the article, as I firmly believe that the linguistic contribution represented by these easily understood youths is immeasurable, and I still have my avaricious eye on that Nobel Prize.

For the sake of the bibliophiles among the Harm City readership I have also retained the section headings for the three short pieces. Thanks to the impressionistic magic of Ebonics these quotes, preserved for posterity below, pretty much tell the tale, as concisely as advertised above.